Did you steal this idea from Stack Overflow

Question

Just curious, which came first.

Answer 1

I don't think it's very precise to call open source programs stolen ones?

Any how, If the program belongs to me and it's up to me I would benefit from any other ideas regardless whether the program is commercial or open sourced.

Also, if you look around you'd see lots of open source programs similer to the commercial ones.

Answer 2

Did stack overflow steal the idea from Yahoo Answers, did Yahoo steal from...

QA sites are as old as the internet and most features are known from forum sites or knowledgebases.

The only thing You could refer to on this site is the optics / the theme. There is some similarity. But due to the flexibility of the q2a theme, i would say it is of minor importance.

Everything else is based on totally different code and user input. You may have a look through the questions, where the author asks for the features the community want to have implemented.

The q2a script here can look like any other question/answer site, by trimming the theme. Like stack overflow, yahoo answers, blurtit, You name them...

For further reading I recommend one of the very first questions on this site where the author points out the most important differences in comparison to stackexchange:

http://www.question2answer.org/qa/5/why-not-use-stackoverflow-apart-from-being-free

Answer 3

Yes, it was obviously inspired by Stack Overflow. Sure there were Q&A websites around before Stack Overflow, but SO revolutionised the format.

The monolithic sites like Yahoo Answers, Experts-Exchange or Answers.com are just plain awful. Stack Overflow made it easy-to-use and put user participation centre stage. That's why there is such an influx of SO-clones today.